It's late on a Sunday afternoon, and Michael Cimino is sitting in a bar describing the most demanding job he has ever had. No, it wasn't directing Heaven's Gate (the epic western that bankrupted United Artists) or making The Deer Hunter. "That's just logistics. That's a different part of your brain," he says dismissively, paying no heed to his reputation as a Von Stroheim-like perfectionist who never cuts corners. Far more daunting, he says, was writing the 173 pages of his first novel, Big Jane.

A red-faced, silver-maned figure with a slow drawl of a voice, Cimino takes his new role as the next great American novelist very seriously. Big Jane is the story of a 6ft 6in tall, 19-year-old woman ("Miss Universe with muscles") who escapes early 1950s Long Island suburbia, falls in love with three different men, rides in rodeos, migrates to Hollywood and ends up fighting in the Korean war.

Korea, says Cimino, is the US's great uncharted war. "It's the only war to which there's no monument. There's no service ribbon for people who fought in Korea. We lost over 30,000 men between 1951 and 1953 - as many as we lost in 15 years in Vietnam. You can imagine how savage it must have been. It wasn't like M*A*S*H - that was all bullshit. And the women who went to Korea really did fight alongside the men. Herman Melville said the American theme was space, Jack Kerouac said it was speed, and Big Jane is both."

Ask Cimino about his literary influences, and out comes a long list that takes in Nabokov, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gore Vidal, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, the classics of Islamic literature, Frank Norris and Steven Pinker. He has probably had plenty of time for reading recently. It's five years since he made his last movie, the underwhelming The Sunchaser. Since then, all we've heard are rumours of new projects and apocryphal stories about his private life. Has he turned to fiction because of the course his film career has taken? Not at all, he says. He sees his novel - written longhand in pencil on a yellow legal pad - as a logical extension of his screenwriting.

Big Jane opens with a quote from Cervantes's Don Quixote. Cimino, too, has spent much of his career tilting at windmills; his projects are always overarchingly ambitious. His latest plan is to make a movie of André Malraux's La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate). He has the same publisher as Malraux, and earlier this year was awarded a Chevalier des Arts and des Lettres in Paris, a prize previously won by the French novelist. If it comes off, this exploration of a communist uprising in Shanghai will be on a gigantic scale, and Cimino, now in his late 50s, plans to shoot on location in China.

The first mooted screen version of Man's Fate didn't fare well. Fifty years ago, Fred Zinnemann was three days into production when the rug was pulled from beneath him by the studio. But such buffetings, says Cimino, are what every generation of studio director should expect. "Hollywood has always been crazy. It's controlled anarchy. But how can you loathe something that has given you so much? I wouldn't have had the life I've had without movies. Anybody who says they're bitter is sick in their soul. They've given up."